THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

Million:In the afternoon of August 7, 1933, a meeting was held in the ministryof economics in which the Germans agreed that every Jew whoemigrates to the Land of Israel would be allowed to take 1,000pounds sterling (about 4,000 U.S. dollars) in foreign currency as wellas goods worth 20,000 marks (about 5,000 dollars), and maybemore, through trust companies. One thousand pounds was the sumrequired to settle in the country as a “capitalist,” as this category ofimmigrants was then called. It was a significant sum in those days,when a family of four could live in bourgeois comfort on less than 25pounds a month. The transfer agreement saved the lives of tens ofthousands of Jews. In retrospect, the agreement with the Nazis wasalso another step leading to the establishment of the State of Israel . . .The transfer agreement was based on identical common interestsbetween the German government and the Zionist movement: the Naziswere interested that the Jews leave Germany; the Zionists wereinterested that they come to the Land of Israel. 1It turns out that before the Nazis started to slaughter Europe’s Jews, they enabled usto build the foundations of our state-to-be, Israel. After the Jewish head wasdecapitated and our limbs cut off in terrible suffering, this very foundation absorbedthe emaciated surviving remnants of European Jewry. After Israel was born in 1948,the German reparations and compensation agreement of 1952 helped the stateregenerate itself. Israel absorbed new immigrants and rehabilitated the war refugees,in effect resurrecting a new Israeli nation that was essentially different from the sum ofthe ragtag Jewish refugees. Thus, the Nazis, in their cruel way, were involved inpromoting the idea of the Zionist state and fulfilling it in three ways: before the warwith the transfer agreements, during the war and its aftermath with the tidal waves ofrefugee migration, and after the war with the great sums of money that the “new”Germany paid on behalf of the “old” Germany.I often wonder if we could have a state at all if not for the Germans and theirsavagery. What would Israel have become if it were established not by the negativeforces of displacement and tragedy but by the positive forces of national revival?How would Israel have been if it were built not by Theodor Herzl, compelled to act